He already had a circlejerk with another poster talking about how China can do it in days (because no osha, you know), and then! said it could also be done more inexpensively by reusing the steel from the collapsed bridge, that, you know, is structurally compromised by the collapse and I can’t imagine the water it’s submerged in is good for its integrity either
This is the kind of person who thinks you can grow and sell a million tomatoes in one year. It's all about "the hustle" - physics and reality be damned.
You can grow a million tomatoes alright, what you can't do is sell them:
30% will be misshapen, so you'll have to throw them away
40% will have some blemish, arrive a day too late to the market, or just be the wrong color and no shop will buy them... but you might be lucky and sell ½ of them for katchup and similar, so that's another 20% getting thrown away
10% (⅕ of the remaining ones) will not get chosen by buyers, and go bad, so... whatever, that's the shop's problem now 😁!
That's a great instinct to have in the current landscape, but keep in mind the rise of machine learning is happening. And there are a few really cool and good use-cases for it. So it might be a hindrance to yourself to automatically throw out anything to do with "AI", you might find something cool to use it for.
For instance, as a hobbyist graphic designer, I use a local instance of Stable Diffusion these days instead of Photoshop to make quick photo edits, saving me hours of manually masking out objects and filling in the blanks.
There are experimental construction printers that use concrete. Unreinforced, expensive specialty concrete, though, and it looks like they take more than a day to run on something big. And I assume sometimes fail like every other printer.
I'd also like to see the pitch on GoFundMe. "Yeah, we actually do have tax collection powers, but we thought it'd be better if you specifically paid for this. Lines are open"
Edit: Wait, are we talking about the bridge? Lol, so this is a kilometers-long bridge that has to float in a bay on a kilometers-long barge, and get lifted into place and fixed to an existing, differently constructed bridge somehow.
Don't forget the pitch is "free to taxpayers", so you gotta tax kindly ask for money from people who aren't paying taxes and most likely will never use said bridge.
"Help us fund the next bridge disaster!" Is certain to attract money
We can indeed print steel with direct metal laser sintering. I think that the object needs heat treatment afterwards, though to be fair it is almost ten years since I properly read up on it and things have probably advanced since then
Well no, you put a conveyor belt in front of all the 3d printers, and when each part is done, it's dumped onto the conveyor belt, which leads all the pieces to an AI powered robot arm which assembles the bridge.
Yeah, I guess you could just run the conveyor belt and arm all the way to where the bridge needs to go.
Seriously, how we make bridges now with giant CNC machines is so inefficient! And all these people saying we should print lots of blocks to put together are totally forgetting about Legos, we all just need to donate our old Legos to Baltimore and let kids from anywhere come volunteer to build it. Free bridge and free child labour! Everyone wins
I find it difficult to believe that breaking down steel to be 3d printed into large structures for a bridge is faster or more energy efficient than casting the parts instead.
Maybe, we could just print off rectangular prism-shaped modules, around the right size to fit in a hand, and then assemble them on site. We could even make them out of ordinary clay and fire them for strength. I wonder why nobody has thought of that. /s
3D printing has it's place, but more conventional methods have theirs too. If you are counting on a lot of human labour anyway you might as well not reinvent the wheel.
And even then, the filament needed at this scale will take another several years, and a few days for shipping.
Also, it doesn't do well in sunlight or high humidity for prolonged periods of time, so we'll need maybe 20 to 30 years to work out a solution for that problem.
Certain arches or domes, maybe a lining for a tunnel. A tower if it's not very windy. Really just all the stuff the Romans built, since that's what they were working with, and their volcanic ash-based cement was somewhat weaker than modern cement.
It would be pretty hard to print between rebar. You'd need a crazy multi-axis head, and at that point it's probably cheaper to just build a form. If they can achieve some significant strength with long fibers, which seems likely, you could spool that into the stream of concrete, but just concrete is already an actively researched problem. Printing one big form in foam or plastic and then filling it could be considered. The manual equivalent certainly makes a great building, especially in harsh climates where insulation is a concern.
Do you really think you could build a tower without tensile reinforcement? The hoop stress on the base of a cylindrical tower is no joke, especially when made from something as dense as concrete...
I will plead not a professional engineer on the one. The Tower of Pisa and it's less leaning cousins are thing, although Wikipedia informs me they were actually medieval and made of joined masonry rather than cast concrete, despite appearances. That's the main reason I brought it up.
Just cut up the model into a million smaller parts and post them on thingiverse so everyone on that site that already has a 3d printer can print one out and mail it to baltimore. EZ
The secret is to spawn multiple AIs to bump the stock, and then for the first AI to cash out early, leaving the other AI instances penniless. Somehow this results in a net positive.
The trick is for those other AIs to reserve a few bucks, so they can repeat the process but this time cash out early. Keep repeating until everybody wins.
Forget the technical BS of this moron, lets focus on the gofundme nonsense.
So I pay into this gofundme thing and that makes me partial owner of that bridge, just like the others who participated. In what fantasy world do you live if you think that bridge will not be blocked for all others who did not participate? Will the people out of the kindness of their hearts allow others to cross that bridge?
If you believe that this bridge will not cause people to throw hissyfits and consider it private then I have a bridge to sell you 😂
No, you see, you just get every citizen to pay a little bit into the bridge, and then everyone can use it. Maybe we put some of that money aside and establish a group of people to care for the bridge, upkeep and whatnot. It wouldn't be fair to just pick them arbitrarily, so we should probably hold some kind of vote. And, well, I guess the money will run out, so maybe we take a little more from everyone every year, just to keep it in good shape
I live near the projects (no judgement, I had my stint in the pjs) and there's a dude who lives there who flies a "don't tread on me" flag. Guess he doesn't mind treading so long as it's paying his rent though. 🤔
He recently upgraded it to the "thinly veiled let's overthrow the gubmint insurrection 1776" flag. It makes me want to drop a note in his mailbox asking who will pay his rent if he overthrows the govt?
Yeah but he's just a temporarily inconvenienced billionaire, the rest of these welfare queens are out here collecting rent and sitting around all day. They don't need the money like he does. As soon as he gets a job, he'll hustle that first billion in no time.
